Simple, intuitive and accurate tools for locating products online are a fundamental requirement for e-commerce on the World Wide Web (WWW). For e-commerce to be successful, the experience of using an e-tailer's digital storefront must compete with the simplicity of walking into a brick and mortar store and being directed to a physical product on a shelf This requirement is most apparent in shopping experiences in which a high degree of “browsing” or looking for products with similar features occurs. In such instances, the ability to bring back targeted results quickly without having to learn complex interaction sequences is critical to the success of the online storefront.
The challenges of providing simple, accurate search tools apply beyond e-commerce and product searches to all searches of “digital catalogs.” Digital catalogs on the WWW hold all types of digital products and items. Examples include news articles, music, movies, software, books, and white papers. A unique characteristic of digital products is that they lend themselves to flexible “packaging:” digital products can be distilled down to component parts that are individually distributable, or can include a number of component parts grouped together. Another significant characteristic of digital products or items is that they often have physical counterparts. A collection or aggregation of songs may directly correlate to a physical album. A collection or aggregation of articles may correlate to an issue of a magazine.
The rapid evolution of requirements for searching digital catalogs is perhaps best illustrated in the growth of online digital music distribution. Music has been sold online since the early 90s. Until recently, however, music has only been available for sale online in its “physical,” shrink-wrapped form, embodied in a compact disc, cassette, or vinyl record.
Early music search engines developed to sell music CDs online managed relatively small catalogs, often with less than a few hundred thousand products, representing all available popular and classical music. These search engines were implemented somewhat simply, relying on standard relational database technology to hold descriptive information about products, and to perform simple SQL-based search queries on individual fields of information. These search engines were limited in function, performance and flexibility.
A fundamental shift in the size and complexity requirements of music search technology came about after the Music Industry joined the supply chain of digital music, and the first legitimate services or “storefronts” for the online sale and digital distribution of music as individual tracks appeared. Although digital music files had been widely available on the web prior to this time, the content was unlicensed and the early aggregators and distributors were violating copyright laws. Consequently, there was no significant investment in improving the user's experience and success rate of locating digital music files. The major record label's participation in licensing and providing digital content to digital service providers and e-tailers laid the groundwork for a new, online marketplace centered around the sale and distribution of a purely digital product.
Digital music is now widely distributed through legitimate channels as downloads, streams, webcasts and even ringtones. In the search technology used by the distributors, the need to locate “albums” and shrink-wrapped products is replaced by the need to locate individual recordings, or tracks of albums. This represents a significant shift in both the number of products that must be managed within digital music catalogs, and the complexity of the catalogs that now have to support products or songs that are included in many different albums. Nevertheless, there are many service providers, portal providers, and retailers, including traditional record stores and online ‘physical product’ retailers, that have a need to distribute digital music over the Internet.
Companies such as Endeca Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., and Mercado Software USA of Palo Alto, Calif., offer products capable of indexing data from relational databases and other sources and supporting search and navigation access to that data Both of these companies have created search engines that index data from relational databases, XML files, and file systems. These systems effectively apply indexing techniques that scale to meet large catalog needs, and through indexing enable simple, single-field, “free text” searches. However, such conventional implementations are ultimately limited in the accuracy they can provide through simple search interfaces. They do not capture the interrelationships of the items that are being searched, and therefore often miss the actual result being sought. As an example, consider a user looking for albums that contain both of the Beatles songs “Help” and “Yesterday.” Conventional album searches may locate albums that contain the two songs, but conventional download searches will fail to bring back any result that does not contain both of the words “help” and “yesterday” in a single song's attributes. Even in conventional album searches, the inability to recognize the input as two distinct popular song titles will result in poor relevance ordering of the results.
Other conventional implementations within the realm of search technology, suffer from additional limitations. Such limitations include requiring multiple search fields in which a user must identify the type of attribute to search within (e.g. must select ‘artist’ to search on an artist's name). The limitations make it difficult to search using different attribute types. In addition, much of the available data is not available as search criteria or for display in the results of a search.
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for locating and distributing one or more products that can be distributed individually. There is also a need for more complete searches, results that fit the search criteria, and coherent ordering of search results. In addition, there is a need to not require multiple search fields and to make available data that is available as search criteria or for display in the results of a search.